TNG Deathmatch Episode 25: The Neutral Zone vs All Good Things…

Well, isn't that an unfair match-up. The Neutral Zone is a really odd choice for a season finale; I'm assuming they did care about such things as season finales back in 1988, though maybe they didn't. The fad for ending every TV season with a cliffhanger wasn't really a thing at that point, and perhaps they thought that people who had stuck with TNG through the whole first season weren't much concerned with quality and didn't need the season to end on a high note.

So, we get The Neutral Zone, which is memorably awful and eminently forgettable at the same time. The crew finds a ship in space with a bunch of cryogenic freezers on board, and three humans inside, fit for revival. They were frozen in the late 90s or thereabouts, in the cryogenics "fad" (according to Data), so they're transported back to the ship and revived, whereupon they reveal themselves to be awful people who should have died.

This episode contains my absolute favourite bash-the-audience moment: Crusher describing the popularity of the cryogenics fad with incredulity that humans were afraid of dying. "They feared death. It terrified them." Those crazy 20th Century humans! Those sillies! And Crusher's job is, um, what, exactly? Nah, advanced 24th Century humans don't bother trying to stave off death because they don't fear it. That's why Crusher just looks up from her desk whenever someone comes into sickbay and tells them to turn right back round and go out the way they came. It's certainly not as if we saw her mourning their failure to save a child in Hide And Q, or struggling to keep Tasha alive in Skin Of Evil, or...

So, the humans are a hyper-capitalist businessman who stupidly doesn't realise that his law firm isn't around anymore; a Southern caricature in need of whiskey and a guitar; and The Girl. (God bless The Girl, the lone female character in any given group of men, a trope that is slowly dying off, thank God. If you're lucky and the gang is big enough, you might get two.) She doesn't get a profession or interests or jokes, because she's The Girl. She didn't even choose to go into cryogenic stasis herself, her husband did it for her. She's listed as a housewife and she weeps a bit over her family, while the men couldn't care less about theirs. Oh Trek. It's all painful, every forced joke, every fish-out-of-water cliche, all awful.

Woven into all this is a subplot featuring the return of the Romulans, who are investigating the destruction of a colony on their borders (a plot line not resolved in this episode; it's later implied that the Borg were responsible, though that would mean that they were close to Federation space a long time before Q introduced them to humanity). It's nothing but an overture, really, a little teaser, a little re-introduction to literally say "we're back". People complain about Shades Of Gray but to my mind, as season finales go, I think this is actually worse. I find it hard to feel too aggrieved by such a blatant money-saver as Shades Of Gray, a literal clip-show, but The Neutral Zone is all the more offensively boring because it's supposed to be an actual episode, not a tossed-off timewaster.

Thankfully, All Good Things... pulls out every last stop to end the series with a bang. It's arguable that TNG should have ended here, that the films failed to capture what made the show special, and I think there's some truth in that. The best episodes of the show were often talky, philosophical; they focused on problem-solving to which the whole crew contributed, whereas the films focused on villains-of-the-week and doomsday devices and were usually focused on Picard. The original films, for all their flaws, managed to tackle other types of story, but every TNG film has a Big Bad and ends with something blowing up.

All Good Things... features a lot of things blowing up too, but that all feels incidental: the episode's real focus is on the characters, and providing a framework for us to say goodbye to them. Picard starts shifting through time, and just as he and Troi (and we) are wondering if he imagined it, he shifts into the future, 25 years hence, where he's tending grapevines in the sun. As he flips back and forth between his future, his presence and his past, he discovers a temporal anomaly whose nature baffles him until Q turns up and alerts Picard to the fact that "the trial never ended", and that the existence of humanity is at stake if Picard can't solve the riddle of the anomaly.

It's a nice touch to explicitly link the episode back to Farpoint, and the inclusion of Q (always welcome) serves to obscure and excuse any inconsistencies. Why doesn't Picard's behaviour in the past affect his present? No idea. Why does the anomaly become visible in the future when it's supposed to be going backward in time? Ehh. Who cares? It would have been nice if every technobabbly detail worked, but it doesn't hurt the episode much, and with Q around you can just say "a wizard did it" and move on with your life. (Says the person writing about an episode that aired twenty-six years ago, but you know what, writing this stuff is keeping me sane in a pandemic and that's all I care about.)

Future Picard has retired to the vineyard and been diagnosed with irumodic syndrome, a degenerative neurological disorder. Word of this has filtered back to Geordi LaForge, who drops by with his shiny new eyes (and I wonder if this bothered LeVar Burton, who had been stuck with the visor for seven years and got rid of it briefly, only to be stuck with uncomfortable-looking contact lenses).

It seems like a DPA breach that "friends at Starfleet medical" told Geordi's wife about Picard's disorder (slap on the wrist from HR there); it seems like insanity for that wife to be "Leah", because the show is implying that Dr Leah Brahms got divorced at some point and married the man who copped off with a holodeck imitation of her. I'm not happy with the implications of that for either Brahms or LaForge - that she becomes the prize for the geeky guy when in reality she'd probably run a mile and politely ghost him after the events of Galaxy's Child, or that he was, and remained, so inept with women that he fixated on his one-time holodeck crush and never moved past that. 

On the plus side, Geordi is now a novelist (of whose work Picard is hilariously critical) whereas it's Leah who's been named head of the Daystrom Institute, which is fitting: Geordi started off as a pilot and pivoted to engineering; it was Leah who designed the ship in the first place. At least the future is progressive enough to allow her to carry on being an awesome scientist while he decides to be artsy, rather than the other way around. (I'll never be unamused by the fact that the premier engineering institute of the future is named after a character whose supercomputer failed and killed a bunch of people, and who then went insane himself. It's like naming your flight school after Icarus or something.)

But anyway. Picard insists he's not an invalid and promptly starts seeing visions of weird, raggedy-looking characters jumping about the vineyard and shouting at him, and then he flips suddenly to a point just prior to the start of the series, and Tasha Yar is piloting a shuttle to take him to the Enterprise for the first time. It's a lovely little scene, with Tasha proudly showing off the Enterprise and Picard visibly moved to see her again. Then he's back in the present (his present), still in his pyjamas (actually a robe that seems designed to make him look like some sort of prophet), and it's off to sickbay for Crusher to have a look at him.

At first, Picard is unable to remember much from one time-jump to another, but after a short while he retains more and more information and the episode flows smoothly, hampered only by the reactions of the rest of the crew. In the past, nobody trusts him because he's an unknown quantity, and in the future nobody believes him because they think he's suffering from neurological degeneration. (It strikes me that this story might have been interesting if it had been presented entirely from the perspective of Future Picard, an old man given the key to saving the universe but whom nobody will believe, conversing with a Q who nobody else can see.) In the present, of course, the Enterprise crew is a well-oiled machine, and the two other time-frames help bring into focus the closeness of the crew, how well they think and work together, and how much we're going to miss spending time with this particular family.

In the future, things have soured a bit for the team. Crusher and Picard have married and divorced in the intervening years, and she's captain of a medical ship, the Pasteur. Data is a Cambridge don, with emotions that are more subdued than the hysterics he displays in the later films (in other words, Data still seems like Data and not like some deranged am-dram caricature). Worf is a Klingon official, grown stolid and weary. Riker is an Admiral and has flowered into full dicketry, a paper-pushing bureaucrat rejecting Picard's request for help. He and Worf are years into a heavy falling-out following Deanna's funeral (yep, she's dead), because Riker didn't want to accept that he and Deanna were really over and Worf never really got together with Deanna because he knew Riker disapproved. 

So, Riker, let's be clear, Riker was the one to abandon Deanna back when they were originally dating, both Riker and Troi had romances with others during their tenure on the Enterprise while apparently being also kinda sorta more-than-friends, but it's Worf's fault that Riker and Deanna never got back together? I'm hoping Deanna just washed her hands of both their indecisive, mopey arses and had some fun before she died.

Riker's dickishness is apparently infectious, because there's no other way to explain why in the future Crusher, Data and LaForge are all sitting with Riker in Ten-Forward while poor Worf sits alone at the bar. Somebody go and talk to the guy! It's like the school bully encouraging his friends to ostracise someone. Enlightened humanity my arse.

Meanwhile, in the past, Picard is unable to stop his knowledge of the future from seeping into his dealings with the crew, who haven't got a clue what he's on about and are questioning his motives and sanity. When he angrily yells for Q to show himself on the way to Farpoint, Worf asks Yar, "What is a Q?" "It's a letter of the alphabet as far as I know," she replies. I love it.

The past sections are the weakest, though it's wonderful to have them as a reminder of how far the characters have come. Picard's conversation with O'Brien feels a little bit meta: O'Brien balks at an assignment, saying nervously that he's not an engineer, and Picard reassures him that he can do it. In reality, O'Brien wasn't even named in that first episode (if I recall correctly), and obviously became one of the franchise's most beloved characters, and a miracle-worker of an engineer who can "turn rocks into replicators". From such humble beginnings do great oaks grow, and end up being tortured week after week on DS9.

It's just that in order for the plot to work - in order for the Enterprise to take the plunge into the anomaly, knowing that they might not survive - the crew has to be willing to take the order to do so from a Captain they don't know, a captain who has behaved erratically since coming aboard, a captain who has defied direct orders and is now telling them he knows them better than they know themselves so they can trust him when he says their destruction is necessary. It's a bit of a stretch, to say the least. I find it hard to believe that someone wouldn't pull a phaser on him and march him off for a psychiatric evaluation. Instead, he gives his stirring speech and they're willing to die for him. I like Patrick Stewart's oratory too, but I wouldn't throw myself off a cliff because of it.

It's all immaterial, though. If you go for a farewell meal with friends, it doesn't matter that the food is lousy or the service is slow. You laugh about it and enjoy the company, and that's what we're here for. The past and future sequences exist to throw into sharp relief how comfortable the crew is in the present, and how comfortable we are with them. I think that's why TNG is still so beloved, and it's something that seems completely alien nowadays, when TV is mature and gritty - this is a show that provides its audience with a surrogate family. It doesn't matter that half the episodes were bad or the characters didn't develop or that there was no bigger story arc. We tuned in each week to spend time solving puzzles with people we liked, and if we were lucky, we got to watch it with the people we loved in real life too. It was, in more ways than one, a family show. There was no better final episode for Trek. This one was a gift to the audience, a perfect encapsulation of the show's appeal.

Q tells Picard that the point of his latest conundrum was to see if Picard could make the logical leap and see the anomaly moving backward through time, but that's not the point at all. The point is that Picard goes to the poker game at the end to sit with his friends, rather than sit in his quarters alone. As Riker realised when he turned down his umpteenth command, nobody wants to leave. These are people who have found their right place, in the right time: they are home.

WINNER: All Good Things....

(And, out of 25 episodes each, Season One is definitively worse than Season Seven, with only seven winning episodes and two draws, in case you were keeping count.)